What will happen if Wagner is trying to destabilise things near the Poland-Belarus border or do activities that normally would been seen as an act of war?
Would NATO see this as an attack from Russia and/or Belarus or would they say it’s a private army/terrorist group that is not connected to a country and let Poland handle it?
Putins russia is like the rapist who in during the process says: – Hey, stop fighting. I do not reject peace talks, but in order for them to begin there needs to be agreement on both sides of how I’m staying put in.
But they don’t reject talks. Just means of getting them started and ignoring everything they don’t like along the way. But they are not rejecting talks. Technically correct is the best correct.
I wish I could say this response is surprising, but it’s really not. When you can’t win by diplomacy, reasoning, and discussion, and when you feel that you have the right to punish other countries for being sovereign, you resort to force and “beat their ass”.
Do you believe France is sovereign, can make their own decisions, and can act in their own best interest, and are fully competent and able to do so? Or do you not believe they have the right to be sovereign and you (whoever “we” is) have the right to force them to align with your interests? If they end up in any agreement with China, it was their own decision and they did so because it benefits them in some way; do you feel you are permitted to punish them for that?
Nah i and my Cookiejar will personally drive the 20 minutes to France and slap someone’s ass for it.
China is a shithole, Dictatorship, with a ongoing genocide and i as a German think its absolutely not ok to even speak with them regarding anything except telling them they can fuck off until they stop genociding people.
Feel the need to further this argument? I don’t care, China is like North Korea to me, fuck them both.
And no, this is about EU matters so France is not sovereign regarding that.
Then come and beat our asses. But rest assured there is no way Macron, this genocidal dictator piece of shit, would ever try to appease tensions with a country that takes care of their population instead of shooting up every protests as he does.
Putin/Russia calls for a cease fire any time they need to reposition their troops. When they’ve moved them to their advantage, they call off the ceasefire and resume the unprovoked attacks.
We need to ostracize China in the same way as Russia, unfortunately. This is too bad because without this underhanded alliance between China and Russia, I would be kinda okay with China. Yeah, they’re not perfect, but at least they’re not Russia.
Yup. Untangling China will/would be much more difficult than dropping Russia was. The latter happened in a year, and with mostly positive ramifications. None of the scare scenarios that tankies talked about a year ago actually happened. We were supposed to get rid of using fossil fuels anyway.
Getting rid of Chinese products would lead to some positive outcomes – less unemployment in Europe being the most obvious one. But it’s an entirely different scale. Russia exported pretty much just alt-right political influence and gasoline. We’ll happily do without either. China has been the leading producers of a lot of important low and high tech for a lot of time.
Elon pulling numbers (which happen to be what the markets want) out of thin site is nothing new. Delivery time of cyber truck? Price points?
He, like jobs before him, has morphed from a brilliant engineer to ruthless marketer. And like jobs before him justifies it versus his internal stunted moral compass
Appreciate him for fostering the electric car economy, admire his work ethic (space x), but hate the guy
Both electric cars and spacex are government subsidized industries. He’s not competing on the free market. Elon excels at getting the government to make his business for him.
Totally agree but they would have been subsidized for anyone. It was Elon who did it
Reminder: I really hate him
But people saying that anyone could have done what he did IF they were born with money or IF government subsidies could somehow apply to them too. Plenty of born rich people out there who didn’t.
He’s a smart guy. Emotionally a child, sociopath and narcissist. But he actually deserves some credit.
Yup, he’s a smart salesperson and businessman, and he knows how to find good engineers. And that has worked out well for him. He had the means and was in the right place at the right time with the right ideas.
Those subsidies are exclusively available only to Elon’s companies?
Come on, he’s a massive douche; but Tesla/SpaceX are in the same market as all their competitors. They’re not special, they just chose to do things others weren’t. Why didn’t GM build BEVs sooner to suck up all those subsidies? Why didn’t ULA land their boosters to reduce launch costs and secure more launch contacts and grants?
Yes it’s bad. Competing for market share should be balanced and free of government intervention. How does a company (small or large) hope to compete against a company that is being subsidised.
Tesla can then undercut their competitors as they don’t need to make a profit. They’re subsidiesed.
Then the government has also imposed regulations for car manufacturers, that if they don’t sell enough EVs in the year, they have to pay a penalty by buying carbon credits.
Well Tesla sells those carbon credits. So they can undercut their competition, entice consumers with lower prices and recoup the losses through subsidies and selling these credits. All thanks to government intervention.
Basically screwing competition and screwing you. As these have knock on effects.
Those other companies can qualify for the same subsidies. Sometimes it’s a first mover advantage (subsidies change over time), and sometimes it’s not. But AFAIK, Tesla and SpaceX don’t get any subsidies that other companies couldn’t qualify for. Maybe there are some that foreign companies can’t get, but that’s not unique to the US (see AirBus vs Boeing).
That said, I’m generally against subsidies. For example, I think the EV subsidies have essentially just changed into additional profit margin. Look at what happened to Tesla Model Y prices when subsidies changed, it basically dropped by the amount of the subsidy reduction. If we removed EV rebates today, I think car companies would drop prices by about that much, which means those rebates are essentially pure profit. I don’t think that’s the case for SpaceX though, but I don’t know enough about that industry to know for sure.
I think the EV subsidies have essentially just changed into additional profit margin.
I would probably say that was their purpose from the beginning. Companies aren’t going to do something unless there is profit to be made. The subsidies exist to create that profit.
Now you could say that manufacturers are charging more and the customers are paying more because they know part of the cost will be reimbursed with the subsidies. But that doesn’t seem sustainable for long, because all it take is one manufacturer to start dropping prices to attract customers. Then everyone would drop prices to match. We weren’t really seeing that previously because everything was supply constrained. But now we seem to be seeing that happen with Tesla at least, they’ve been dropping prices in the USA recently.
Why would they? The only reason Tesla dropped prices is because the government capped the subsidy based on sale price, so Tesla dropped just enough to qualify for the subsidy.
We shouldn’t be subsidizing these at all for precisely the reason you stated: we’re largely supply constrained. The EVs that don’t sell well are super unattractive (e.g. Chevy EVs are priced right but have had a ton of recalls, Nissan Leafs didn’t have nearly enough range, etc).
What we should be doing instead is jacking up the cost of fossil fuels based on CO2 load, and do that for imported goods as well (estimate a CO2 load for all products and tax accordingly). It would have a similar effect of making EVs more attractive, but it would hit consumers directly instead of indirectly through an unrelated tax burden. I propose that these tax revenues be paid back to the population in the form of a “stimulus” check with no restrictions as a form of reparation for producing CO2 (or maybe we use it to fix Social Security in the short term). As people move to greener products, the “stimulus” would naturally go down.
But no, we did it in the least productive way possible. Instead of discouraging use of fossil fuels, we’re rewarding companies for increasing profit margins.
Except he never was a brilliant engineer, he was fired for engineering incompetence at one point, and he’s been lying about having an engineering degree.
reuters.com
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